Fiction.

Cars, Communists And Fellow Feeling Back In '50s Omaha

August 01, 1993|By Reviewed by James North, A Chicago-born writer who has reported from Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The Red Menace

By Michael Anania

Moyer Bell, 150 pages, $7.95 paper

In this poignant novel, first published in 1984 but long out of print, the accomplished poet Michael Anania applies his gift for word-images to some unusual subjects-such as the souped-up V-8 Fords and Pontiac Catalinas that he and his teenage friends doctored and drove around Omaha, Nebraska, a couple of generations ago.

"In the fifties," Anania recalls, "the impulse was to smooth the car into a single uncluttered mass. The (1940s) jalopy had been replaced by the bomb. In extremely refined circumstances the chrome was replaced with pin striping. The flow lines of air across its lacquered skin were remade in thin, painted lines that swirled or feathered around headlights and taillights like the vortices smoke makes as it eddies around an airfoil in a wind tunnel. At their most extreme these were embellished into red, orange, and yellow flames that seemed to burst the cars they decorated straight out of hell and down the street."

Anania, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, dwells lovingly on cars in this fictionalized autobiographical coming-of-age story, which is dense with original images. This is not the usual '50s memoir of suburbia and white picket fences. Anania's family lived in an integrated low-income housing development in central Omaha, and his playmates were named Herman, Balls and Otis instead of Dick, Jane and Sally.

He conveys clearly that working on cars was more than just a hobby. It was the way these young men expressed themselves-by manipulating the mass-produced products of the industrial world that would soon have them at work inits lower levels, swinging shifts at the local factories.

But Anania's friends shaped the world they were given: "If you liked chrome, you could fill the engine compartment with it. There were chrome breathers for most carburetors, chrome manifolds, and chrome nut covers for the nuts that held the top of the engine down. For Fords and Chevys with tin tappet covers over the top of the engine, there were full chrome lids. You were supposed to keep the engine clean."

The 1950s were also the time of the communist threat, and Anania is excellent at showing how the high-level scaremongers who ran America back then created fears that reached right down into his neighborhood of the working poor. "We learned . . . the TNT ratings of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons," he remembers. "Communism, the takeover, the Russians, the Red Chinese, the Bomb, Quemoy and Matsu were among the childhood terms of my generation, entirely woven into what we did. . . ."

At one stage, public housing residents were even required to sign a loyalty oath. Anania's mother joked that any genuine communist would "sign this quick as anything," but the authorities did not like her humor.

An important note of sanity amid this hysteria is provided by Louie, a heavy-drinking dishwasher alongside whom the young Anania worked. During Louie's perambulations through hotel kitchens across the western United States, he actually has met the occasional flesh-and-blood communist organizer. He classifies communists with such other annoying do-gooders as "preachers, social workers, democrats (and) missionaries," dislikes being addressed as "comrade" and "worker" and, worst of all, mistrusts men whose women all seem to be "ugly and fat, every damned one of them, big fat arms, legs like pool tables."

In the end, despite the sometimes bleak housing-project setting and the Cold War silliness, "The Red Menace" prompts a certain nostalgia. Anania's neighbors lived in a community in which people of all kinds looked after each other; Anania's father organized the pallbearers after the woman next door dropped dead.

The author and his friends did have the atomic bomb to worry about, but none of them doubted that at the very least they would land a decent job in construction or in an Omaha factory, a job that would enable them to raise families, make payments on their Plymouth Club Coupes and Chrysler 300s and give them enough leisure time to keep doing a few things to their engines.

Today, the Cold War is over, but many of those solid factory jobs are gone. Among the descendents of Anania's neighbors, there is less confidence in the future.

Sadly, the automobile culture has changed, too; teenagers today drive cars but don't work on them the way they used to. One possible explanation is that you have to take your car to a computerized garage just to tune it. But maybe there is another, less tangible, reason: Why show a craftsman's care for the products of an industrial world that can't even offer you a decent job anymore?